Eating speed

[Silfir]

Gnomish candy takes a couple of rounds to eat completely is the problem. So do cooked lizards, I think. Fortune cookies indeed don't.

Blessed stoma takes ages to eat. I wouldn't recommend it during a battle. If you don't mind the speed loss you can eat it before the battle starts.

[Baranor]

Who has two thumbs and doesn't care about the Toughness stat when there are herbs around?


bd

This guy.

[QuickDraw]

You can`t always raise your To with herbs, besides there are many better things to eat than candy. After Griffyard eating gnomish candy is highly inadvisable.

[Silfir]

Highly inadvisable? Eat one morgia root after the gnomish candy and the minor negative training is made up for right away! It's not even about retraining the lost toughness - one morgia means it's not even getting reduced.

I mean, of course there's lots of other stuff to eat, but this sounds like gnomish candy is the work of the devil. It's lightweight very nutritious food that may reduce your toughness stat. That's all.

[JellySlayer]

I believe the problem is that morgia can't compensate for the negative training if your toughness is >25 (or >30 if you include starvation).

[Silfir]

Code-dived information from the *sigh* Improved Guidebook says:

Morgia Root trains Toughness up to 25, 5d100+200

If you eat morgia before the training check is done, it's more than enough to counteract the negative training score. That is unless the morgia root limit prevents you from receiving any training points if you're at 25 or higher. I don't know about that.

Let's take a typical starvation/sickness PC: Learning at, what the hell, 20, Toughness at 35. 50 negative training points for toughness. So N according to the Improved Guidebook's formula is 350. This means a chance for a stat decrease of about 14%. I might drop to 34 with a 14% chance! Oh noes!

The lower the toughness, the HIGHER the chance becomes, actually. A 9 To gray elven wizard, with 20 Learning all the same, will lose one point of toughness with a chance of over 50%. So yes, if you don't have morgia and low toughness, don't eat gnomish candy unless you can help it. If you have morgia, don't care and eat morgia afterwards. If your toughness is high enough you can't repair the damage with morgia, the chance you're taking is low.

For overall food strategy, it's best to keep gnomish candy around for emergencies anyway because it weighs nothing and gives lots of nutrition. Just eat it up during your toughness stat training, when the negative training scarcely puts a dent into the performance of your morgia roots anyway.

[Sami]

Here are some figures how long eating of some different types of food takes.
In most cases (with exception of gelee royal and food taking 1 turn to eat at least) eating cursed food takes only half the turns it takes to eat an uncursed one and eating blessed one seems to take always exactly same time than eating uncursed one.

So if you need to eat in combat, eating cursed food might be the best idea (for example cursed iron ration gives 250 satiation points in 2 turns which is same what you get from 10 blessed seeds for example).

                cursed  uncursed  blessed
iron ration     2       4         4
large ration    2       4         4
cooked lizard   2       4         4
corpses*        2       4         4
fortune cookie  1       2         2
stomafillia     4       8         8
other herbs     1       1         1
gnomish candy   4       8         8
gelee royal     8       12        12
seeds           1       1         1
bee wax         1       1         1

*tested with only some basic (uncooked) corpse types, like spiders, bats, kobolds and orcs.

[Soirana]

To continue cookie propaganda:

Fortune cookies satiation values -
uncursed 100
cursed 50
blessed 125

So if your really need to do fast meal, cursed cookie in one turn will give you some time... If you have two i guess something like cursed rations win...

Overall cookies are more weight efficient when hurthling cakes and rations... They are actually on parity with fried bats...

Cooking corpses seems double their eating time. Funny, why should raw corpses be easier to swallow...

[UnknownSoldier]

Thanks for all the answers

It seem counter-intuitive that cursed food should be better in this aspect.

I agree that weightwise cookies are better, but speedwise cursed ration seems best.

So a cursed ration (whaterever the type) will give you 250 satiation for 2 turns. This in turn will give you between 250 turns of fighting (best case?) and 10 ish (worst case : overburdened uncrowned invisible troll with artifacts ?)
The best case will probably last you to the end of the fight.
For the worst case it is more doubtful, 10 turns can go awfully fast even if you only want to flee...

[Silfir]

If you deck yourself out in artifact and invisibility gear while being an overburdened uncrowned troll, I do think you deserve what's coming to you. In that case you'd do better eating blessed stoma before every fight and lose ten points of speed more.